Technology; stuff that doesn’t work

Some recent examples:

Yesterday, my wife called me on my cell phone. I never received the call. So she left voice mail. I didn’t receive that, either. Fortunately, we still have a land line, and she was able to get me there. As usual, I turned off the cell phone overnight. When I turned it on this morning, the voice mail was waiting for me. My best guess is that the cell network somehow lost a database entry, so lost track of my phone.

After I had finished testing epiphany (web browser), I switched the default browser back to rekonq. Then I ran into a site where rekonq hung, but konqueror seemed to work. So I switched my KDE default browser back to konqueror — or so I thought. But, when I loaded a page via akregator, up came “midori”. Sigh! To set the default to “konqueror”, I use the setting “in an application based on the content of the URL”. That’s because it doesn’t work properly if I instead directly specify “konqueror.” And apparently, “midori” had set itself as the application to handle text/html. I fixed that in the File Associations settings, and finally had “konqueror” back as default browser.

Arguably, the epiphany browser is a case of “stuff that doesn’t work.” See my recent review.

After starting this enumerated list, I decided to add a line before the list. The wordpress visual editor would not allow that. If I placed the cursor at the earliest allowable position in the edit window, that was after the “1” item. And hitting enter just gave me a new blank “1” item, and renumbered the subsequent items. I had to go to the text mode editor to fix the problem.

I sometimes call myself “a hi-tech Luddite.” I use the stuff, and enjoy using it. But I don’t trust it. There’s always something broken.